Bee v1.4 just hit the App Store and is also available via the web site. The major feature in this release is something that has been frequently requested: file upload support!

There’s a completely new UI for viewing file attachments and JIRA and FogBugz now support uploading and emailing files.

File Attachments

When an issue or case has file attachments, they’re displayed inline with the other fields. You can click on a file to view it with QuickLook (and if it hasn’t been downloaded yet - it will download and then open in QuickLook automatically).

To add new files, simply drag and drop them into the details pane. Or you can click the attachment icon to bring up the standard open sheet. The same behaviour works for the Global Create Window and also for the FogBugz reply and forward email windows.

To delete files, hover over the preview image and click the round delete button in the top-right (only JIRA supports this feature currently). Your changes will not take affect until you hit ‘Save’ at the bottom of the form as per usual.

Its simple and clean and works exactly as you’d expect.

Here’s a quick clip showing off the new animations and interaction of the file attachments UI:

URL Scheme

You can now right-click the item identifier in the details pane to copy a Bee URL. This is a URL scheme which you can then pass around to your teammates e.g. via iMessage. Also handy for scripting.

The URL scheme is of the format:

bee://item?id=<item identifier>&project=<project name>

The project parameter is optional however it is needed if you have multiple items in different projects with the same identifiers.

Other Features for Workflow

Other noteworthy features include:

• A new keyboard shortcut to jump straight to the comment window to reply to the viewed item (Command-Shift-r).
• Command-clicking any link will now open that link directly in your web browser, rather than showing you the popover window.
• You can now specify fields to always be hidden by clicking the item menu and navigating to ‘Always Hidden Fields’.
  • This is useful for some JIRA projects which have lengthy template fields and would be better off unseen.
• New grouping options to Group by Group and to Group by Smart List.
  • This means you can now have a single stream of items underneath a Group, instead of having your items broken up by project groups.
• When grouping the list, Bee now automatically collects groups with similar names and combines them into 1 group.
  • E.g. useful when viewing a Smart List and there are multiple projects with the same type of: “Issue” and you want to Group by Type.

More to Come

A lot more features are in the pipeline so stay tuned. Fast release cycles are still the best way to move Bee forward and will continue to occur.

The best way to keep informed is via @thebeeapp on Twitter where previews of new or in-development features are sometimes shown.

And as always, the release notes give short summaries on the new features and fixes.

Wednesday February 12, 2014